


Good Day for Ghosts

by cryogenia



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-29
Updated: 2013-09-29
Packaged: 2017-12-27 22:30:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/984361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryogenia/pseuds/cryogenia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermann wakes into the new world, and carries the remains of the old with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Day for Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KellerProcess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KellerProcess/gifts).



> A/N: Slight warning that Hermann's descriptions of his mobility are influenced by my own experience, so there's a few references to his 'bad' leg.

He wakes into the new world violently, in the middle of a stair step, the last gasp of a scream. Can’t scream, lungs aren’t formed yet. They are. His entire body swoops from a fall he hasn’t taken and he claws for a railing, drops back to himself. 

He lays there for a long moment, too stunned to lift his head. It’s dark out, tinged with umber; the unmistakeable hue of what passes for safety lights in the lower levels of the Shatterdome. His face is mushed into something soft and breathing and his right hip is pins and needles on down, and he remembers he’d been saying something before that sensation of falling. Talking. To—

And now he’s dropping a second time because he’s placed that raspy breathing and the softness is skin that he is sure is inked, and he sits up so fast his bladder screams. He knows at least three languages (German natively, English fluently, Cantonese barely) but his tongue trips over all of them because they are naked,  _oh god, he’s naked_ , and his whole body is buzzing with adrenaline and surprise. 

 _How much alcohol—_  except they hadn’t, they hadn’t drunk anything; they’d snuck past the med team and into this room, and he thinks he remembers fumbling for a light switch but he doesn’t remember why. His ruined sweater, coming off in the dark. The whole evening it hadn’t fit, not since the Drift, not since the way Newton slotted against his side. They’d just needed to be close, they’d agreed. They’d just needed to crawl back inside.

 _Post Drift Dependency Syndrome_ , his lips trace out, finally finding what he’d been saying before he’d fallen to (and from) sleep. They taste stale and strange from sleep, and anyway, Newton isn’t awake to continue arguing.

He determines he should get up, to find the head if not his wits. The bed births him into an alien, unfeeling world and punches the air right out of his chest. It’s freezing cold and his bladder is about to burst and  _where in the seven hells is his cane_?  He could crawl since the day he was born (but something isn’t right about that) and he doesn’t think his leg could take a bend regardless. The last forty hours saw him running and climbing and he’ll pay that bad debt back for weeks. 

He takes a deep breath and feels with his feet, one inch at a time, ignoring the lighting jangling down his right side. There’s a seam of grooved metal that runs down the center of all the sleeping berths and his good toes catch it, cling to it as a lifeline. If he keeps to a good reference and moves very, very slowly, he can balance without assistance. Each step he takes is carrying him farther away, and it’s agony to stay upright when he just wants to go back, slither under the covers and curl up inside Newton’s chest where he belongs (that’s not right, either). The only thing that keeps him moving is the humiliating thought of pissing on the floor, like a baby, like an animal, and he refuses. He  _refuses_.

Somehow the odyssey passes, and his hands discover a doorframe about where he’d expected. The head he finds isn’t his, but the amenities are in the same place. The tiny sink is close enough to use as a substitute grab bar and he proves to himself again he is an independent, adaptable adult. 

Newton is — a good friend, yes. Good in every sense that exists; good enough (and reckless enough, and arrogant enough, and nearly suicidal enough) to save this entire, miserable world. He’d felt the shape of that conviction, a monolith in the drift. Funny, he’d never thought — no, that’s preposterous, of course he’d believed they were both on the same team. It was just that Newton’s passion, his obsession with the monsters had been so overwhelming. He’d never dreamed anything could match that in magnitude, he’d never imagined Newton seizing on the floor. Not even a mad scientist, a mad engineer, despicable, lovely creature; and then he’d been inside Newton’s head and then he’d felt a  _third_  great need and it’s too much. Oh god. 

He ought to get out of here before he can never leave.

He staggers back into the room and gropes miserably for a light switch that exists in dimensions just beyond his reckoning. Gives up and attempts to hug the wall. Easiest algorithim for maze solution in simply-connected space, just keep one hand in contact with the right side and he’ll escape eventually. Something catches his good leg and he squeaks at the unexpected change in elevation, but the wall is enough brace to keep from falling. His toes are sinking into an inexplicable amount of fur and — parka, who left his good parka crumpled on the floor?  He has the depressing suspicion it was himself. 

He waves at it ineffectively with a missing cane, then his brain wakes up enough to tell him he’s a prat. He edges his good toes into the hood and kicks it awkwardly at his hand until he can reach it. At least he’ll have warmth, if not his dignity. The parka wraps him up like the womb, like a hug. He almost has the zip all the way up before the light clicks on, and he can’t help it, he freezes. His eyes are too new, and his hands can’t remember how hoods work.

Newton isn’t much better, as far as he can tell. He’s propped up at an angle tangential to his hair, which  makes no sense for multiple reasons and makes him despair for his likely damaged brain. He could describe Newton with math, he thinks inanely, he’s all curves and soft contours and he’d be a joy to wireframe. With his fingers. He wants to map every path with his fingers, make sure he has the right textures for the mesh.

"Hermann?" Newton is saying and his voice is rough with sleep, and oh gee. That’s his name.

Higher-order language fails. Newton drags his glasses down from his forehead and they’re ruined beyond repair. Possibly dangerous. He wants to tug the shattered things off and hurl them away before Newton cuts himself. He wants so very many things, but most of all, he wants to disappear.

Newton seems to sense it because he bolts upright. The covers slide down to his hips, revealing his little swell of a belly, the lower bound of his ink. He has a moment where he wonders why there, why not down to his legs, is it because Newton’s legs are so hairy, or was it that Newton was waiting for more, saving room for kaiju he didn’t think they’d defeat, then he remembers he wondered this  _last night_  and oh look, his legs are moving on their own.  

"Dude, I—" Newton’s voice sounds as shaky as Hermann feels and his tattooes wobble when he swallows. "Where are you going?"

Something constricts around his throat and he is glued to the floor again, a trickle of sweat tickling down his back. His fingers curl defensively over the useless zip and he squirms beneath his parka. It’s not like he can pretend he’s not naked under here.

"[I don’t know]," he admits in entirely the wrong language and — it’s all wrong, God. Newton’s upper eyelids are lowering and vertical wrinkles are gathering at his forehead and the corners of his lips have turned down and he is displeased. This is why they cannot do this, he cannot do this. They’ve gone about this in the wrong order and now there is no road map, and all he wants is to gobble Newton up. 

"I don’t know," he says again in English. "We were instructed to report to Medical. Ought to have done. They were expecting us." 

Newton’s eyes are round again. Concerned. 

"You okay?"

"Yes," he says. He’s also fifty percent sure he’s lying. 

"Perhaps no. We don’t know, we never made it to Medical. And we drifted with a kaiju, you twice —"

His breath catches. The realization wells up like poison, leaves an ammonia reek in his mouth.

"And you need an MRI, you had  _seizures_!  I shouldn’t have let you fall asleep -“

"Whoa dude," Newton says. "Hey. Calm down, it’s cool. If I were going to brain bleed and die in my sleep — well I wouldn’t be talking to you right now, obviously — but I think I would have already done it."

He can’t fathom how Newton is smiling, discussing his own death. It makes him want to scream into his parka. It makes him want to dive wailing to the Breach.

"That’s not how brain injuries work," he manages. "You’re a biologist, have some sense."

 ”And you’re a physicist,” Newton shoots back. “But whatever, House.”

He holds up a hand and ticks off symptoms in rapid succession. 

"No headache, no lethargy, no vision loss, no problems with balance—"

He pauses to scrunch up each side of his face.

"Voluntary bilateral motion. See?  I’m perfectly fine."

"You’re a perfect fool."  _You’re perfect._

He can’t even pretend he hates Newton anymore. Not even to himself.

Newton’s eyes have gone soft about the edges, and they’re so warm. So dark. 

"You were worried about me. " 

He shrugs a little helplessly. What point is there denying it?  He knows Newton is speaking of more than the med bay. 

"It seems," he says slowly. "At the end of all things, I was glad to have you with me."

He hadn’t said it then, in the drift. He hopes Newton feels it now.

"Seriously?"

"…what?" Something in his stomach flips, starts to churn with acid.

"Seriously??  Did you just—"

He’s starting to retract into his long sleeves, but the look on Newton’s face stops him dead. Newton spreads his arms as wide as his smile, and the light in him — God, he shines.

Oh. He thinks. Oh.

"Come back to bed."

"It’s not even your bed. Is it your bed?" he asks faintly, wonders why he knows that is true. Lack of endless manga magazines?  No, he remembers, some poor random person’s room, they had just crashed somewhere in C-Sector (not that the whole Dome wasn’t doing the same).

"I don’t care, dude, that was Tolkien, you quoted fucking  _Tolkien_  at me, get-over-here-and-get-rid-of-that-thing—”

"Paraphrased," he feels compelled to say, but now he’s smiling too. Newton wiggles ten fingers and ten toes, urging him onward, and he’s going to devour every single last one of them.

"But all right. I’m — give me a moment."

The world is still cold, and he’s still a disaster, but Newton is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen and he can’t stop staring. It’s funny, he thinks. Two ghosts still rattling around his head, but for the first time, he thinks he might truly be himself.

The parka falls to floor. 

He takes his first step.


End file.
